


My Heart Belongs To Brooklyn

by KiiKitsune



Category: Captain America (2011)
Genre: Angst, Best Friends, Fear of Rejection, Friendship, Insecurity, M/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-18
Updated: 2012-06-18
Packaged: 2017-11-08 00:48:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 1,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/437296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KiiKitsune/pseuds/KiiKitsune
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things change.<br/>Steve focuses on what stays the same.<br/>Bucky keeps getting caught up on what's different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Guilty

**Author's Note:**

> This is a series of drabbles set within one continuity and put in chronological order. I started writing them from random prompts, then realized I could connect them together.
> 
> I've seen a lot of fics where Bucky was all gung-ho about Steve post-serum but I can't help but think it would have changed how Bucky sees him.
> 
> Title is from 'Brooklyn' by Woodkid, which is awesome and I need to make a vid of it.

Sketchbooks and pencils are expensive. Sometimes Steve wishes he’d never started drawing.

It’s a habit now. 

His hands itch to draw the world around him; to commit it to something more permanent than memory. The beauty of things just strikes him sometimes and he knows he has to catch it and pin it down like a butterfly.

Steve isn’t very protective of his work but there’s always a hot crawling feeling in the back of his throat whenever Bucky flips through his books. It’s not that he’s embarrassed of his art, though it will never be as good as he wants it to be, it’s that he draws what he sees and more often than not he sees Bucky. 

Bucky never mentions it, but Steve knows he notices and that makes the paper and charcoal that show up every time Bucky gets some extra shifts at the shop all that much more confusing.


	2. Questionable Priorities

If Bucky were the type to bemoan things, he'd bemoan the fact that Steve's never really gotten his priorities straight. The guy puts justice over safety. He puts strangers over himself. He's a good man; for better or worse. More often worse. 

Sometimes Bucky wishes Steve would be selfish, wishes Steve would ignore the bullies and save himself the black eye. Maybe it's selfish of Bucky to want that. He supposes that one of them has to be. 

Bucky wants a lot of things, and he's never seen a problem in wanting them. He's a taker but Steve is a giver, so it all works out in the end. Except for when it doesn't-- when he can't voice what he wants to take because he isn't sure if Steve will give it and he doesn't want to find the end of Steve's generosity. 

So he doesn't tell Steve to pretend mean men don't exist, because that would make Steve selfish and a selfish Steve might not want him. It might make Bucky a bad man, but he'd rather see Steve's bruises than his rejection.


	3. On The Floor

It’s unbearably hot. They’ve got the window open to let in the breeze and the curtains closed to keep out the sun. Bucky gives up trying to get anything accomplished and just collapses on the floor in the shadow of their couch. 

He shimmies out of his pants and tosses off his shirt, leaving his underwear on for Steve’s sake. The floorboards are cool, if a bit grimy. When was the last time they cleaned?

Steve comes in and sits down beside him, holding an ice cold Coke bottle to Bucky’s navel. Bucky takes it and sits up, pressing it to his forehead with a groan. “I love you.”

Steve rolls his eyes, “Me or the Coke?”

“Can’t it be both?” Bucky takes a swig. 

Steve does the same from his own bottle. “I dunno, the Coke might get jealous.”

“And you wouldn’t? I’m falling down on the job here.”

Steve nudges him in the side with his knee, smiling, “Not such a Casanova after all, eh?”

“Ah, shut up. It’d work if you were a girl.” Bucky smacks his leg lightly and resolutely doesn’t think about all the things that could work if Steve was a girl. Things might be easier, but there’s really no use in pondering could haves and maybes. He likes Steve the way he is, anyways.


	4. Pinned Down

Bucky’s hands can wrap around Steve’s wrists with room to spare. His thumbs brush over his middle and forefingers. Palms flat against the thin skin of Steve’s inner wrists he squeezes-- watches, rapt, as Steve’s fingers twitch involuntarily. 

He forces himself to look at Steve’s eyes instead; they’re wide, a little shocked maybe, but not scared. Steve is never scared, even when he should be. That’s half the reason Bucky needs to let go and take half a step back, force a laugh and pull Steve away from the brick wall and into the bar. 

The other half is because Steve is small. Steve is small and Bucky is big and if Bucky doesn’t stop himself he isn’t sure that Steve could.


	5. Absence of Fear

Men don’t always come back from war. For all the pomp and glory the movies and posters tout, Bucky knows there is nothing glamorous about winding up dead in foreign mud. He’s never been a pessimist, but he has no illusions as to his chances of being one of the unlucky ones. 

He’s leaving anyways, in less than an hour. 

There’s a train that will take him to the nearest army base and, from there, deployment. Steve met him at the station. They stand against the wall, looking out over the tracks and the people. It’s late enough that the rush-hour mobs have dissipated, but early enough that the night life hasn’t yet surfaced.

Bucky keeps shooting Steve side-long glances. They said their goodbyes already, back at the expo. He expected that to be it, but now Bucky feels the weight of everything else that’s gone unsaid for too long pressing in on him. 

Steve finally looks up at him and says, “What is it?”

Bucky bites his tongue. 

“Nothing.”

Men don’t always come back from war, but sometimes they do. If he does, Bucky would like to have something to come back to.


	6. First Light Of Dawn

The apartment is too quiet. There’s a heavy absence that Steve can’t sleep away, so he sits up in his bed with a blank page and the new charcoal he’d found on the kitchen table after getting home from seeing Bucky off.

He rolls the stick between his fingers, feeling the hard edges and watching as it stains the pads black. It feels like dust and oil, like the dirt and sweat that used to gather on his skin those days when he was well enough for Bucky to drag him out to play. 

When morning comes half the stick is gone and the paper is still pristine.


	7. Skin Deep

After the change, Steve doesn’t feel any different. He takes up more space, mostly. 

It’s everyone else that changes. Suddenly he’s not invisible.

He realises that’s a lie after the third woman propositions Captain America. Steve Rogers is, just as he ever was, non-existent. 

Part of him wishes things could go back to the way they were, because it was so much easier to tell who really wanted him around. Granted, there weren’t a whole lot who did, but he’d rather have one man like Bucky than a thousand fans with their gazes set firmly on the Star Spangled Man. 

Actually, he’d rather just have Bucky.


	8. Tending To The Wounded

When Steve leads the liberated men back to the camp, everyone calls Steve a hero. Once Bucky manages to get away from the medics he finds Steve’s tent and calls him an idiot. 

“What?”

“I leave for ten minutes and you get yourself turned into a science experiment? Really?” Bucky had told him not to do anything stupid, and yet. 

“I just wanted to help.”

“You always just want to help. There are other ways you could have-”

“We already had this conversation, Bucky.” It comes out short and authoritative. It takes Bucky a moment to process the fact that Steve isn’t arguing. He’s giving an order. 

Bucky can be a good soldier, if that’s what Steve wants.

“Thanks for saving me then, Captain.”

Steve grins like that’s what he’s been expecting from Bucky all along. Bucky pretends it doesn’t sting.


	9. Close Enough To Hurt

Steve pulls and Bucky follows. Bucky follows him to Coney Island, to fair rides and candy apples they can't really afford. Bucky follows him into fights, into back alleys and fisticuffs Steve is too small for. Bucky follows him to their shared apartment, to the bed Steve is too sick to get out of and the old pack of playing cards they've had since the orphanage. Steve pulls, and sometimes it's like being pulled in front of a freight train, like playing brinkmanship with headlights and coal fire, and it's still the best feeling in the world. 

This isn't Steve though. 

Logically, he knows it is. Bucky catches glimpses sometimes; when he shies around a woman or refuses to back down from anyone. He sees Steve in this man's smiles. It feels more like someone took bits of his friend and transplanted them though, because Steve is small and this man is big and the world reacts accordingly.

Bucky tries, he really does, to convince himself it doesn't change anything. Not even the Captain believes that though. Oh, he doesn't make it obvious, probably doesn't even realise it half the time, but there's a certain type confidence Steve never had and an easiness with people Bucky can't remember. Most of all, most importantly, Bucky is not this man's best friend. Captain America belongs to the people, to the troops. Steve has always belonged to Bucky. If that makes him selfish, well, he stopped caring when he realised the boy he grew up with had disappeared.

Captain America pulls and Bucky follows because it's the closest he'll get to having Steve  
back. Bucky follows him into war zones and Hydra bases, to the graves of men who didn't deserve to die. Bucky follows him into enemy territory with a gun, his dog tags, and a bullet for the brain of any German stupid enough to point a pistol at them. Bucky follows him to makeshift camps and bars, getting drunk for both of them. Captain America pulls, and it feels more like he's dangling off the side of a speeding train than facing one down; twice as exhilarating without any of the fun. 

He knows he's going to fall off in the same way he knew that, before, he'd never get hit.


	10. I Walked With Heroes

Steve mourns. He mourns right up until the moment the water breaks through the glass and floods his lungs. Peggy had told him to respect Bucky’s choice. Steve is ashamed that he goes to his own grave knowing he can’t.


	11. The Sound Of Your Voice

Bucky wakes up from a dream that should be a nightmare. He knows he dies at the end; the rush of cold water and ice is what snapped his eyes open, after all. It was too beautiful to be horrible though.   
  
All he can see are the fat, lazy snowflakes swirling around him in a sea of whites and grays. The sky above is pale and flat with winter’s cloud cover.   
  
He doesn’t know where he is, not really. There was a map and a name, but how can he claim he knows it, the same way he might say he knows Brooklyn-- with its dingy back alleys and too small apartments and skinny blond kids who don’t know when to quit? That, he thinks, would be a disservice to both places.  
  
He’s falling and flying. Weightless and heavier than he’s ever been. He left his stomach a hundred feet up and the rush of air is deafening so he closes his eyes and thinks of the last thing he heard.  
  
 _“Grab my hand!”_  
  
Bucky wakes up to a nightmare that should be a dream. Dead men aren’t meant to wake up. The Russians make him wish he hadn’t, and then they make him stop wishing altogether. It comes as a blessing.


End file.
